That doesn't matter. How many people does something have to be able to kill before being banned? The truck attack in France was deadlier than any mass shooting in America.
There are costs to freedom, including the potential for abuse. Just like predictive policing is wrong because it goes after those who haven't committed crimes, banning guns is wrong. The death of a ten, a hundred, a thousand, or more people doesn't justify restricting liberty. All guns ought to be legal.
The premise of your argument seems to be that the number of victims that a weapon can be unleashed on should not be a criterion for banning it. Am I getting that right?
If so, can I please be allowed to have my own private nuclear warhead? I promise to only use it as a deterrent against a similarly armed government getting too "oppressive".
I promise not to set it off in a bout of drunken depression.
Ahh, I love the McNuke argument. It's like "what about the roads" but for firearms policy. I've actually thought pretty hard about it, but no, I don't think so, and I believe my reason is consistent with the ideology I expressed above. The issue with nukes is that it's simply not possible to detonate one without causing collateral damage. Fallout, radiation poisoning, etc. So the government can in fact act to keep these externalities from harming others.
> The issue with nukes is that it's simply not possible to detonate one without causing collateral damage.
Sure, how about a howitzer then?
What you're failing to see or refusing to admit is that you too want to restrict access to weapons based on a certain threshold of collateral damage/body count each of them can inflict.
It's just that for some (perhaps most) of us, an AR-15 is way past our threshold.
As for the truck you mentioned that was used in France: if it's ever found that a certain truck model makes it particularly easy to run over people with, I bet my bottom dollar that soon after there will be legislation enacted restricting access to it.
No, I don't want to restrict ownership of howitzers. Though personally, I'd prefer an M61 vulcan. So no, I wouldn't say I'd restrict based on body count.
The issue is not the fallout but the fact that a nuclear weapon cannot be targeted - it by its very nature and design harms innocent civilians. Compare that to a fierarm, which can obviously be directed one way or the other. It's the same reason I wouldn't load my concealed carry handgun with FMJ rounds.
Realistically, if you fire a howitzer you have zero assurance that the shell will only land upon legitimate targets. The recent hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan are testament to the indiscriminate destructive power of military weapons.
Private ownership of nuclear weapons has a slightly different problem that isn't usually brought up in the "nuclear garden gnome" discussions: it has a capability to break the MAD doctrine. If your country allows anyone to own a warhead (and perhaps also a delivery system), then from the outside perspective, you're an unpredictable first strike threat. Which means suddenly the best option is to preemptively glass you, in order to not have to deal with you anymore.
It's interesting to consider power balance theory in other contexts, eg the # of applications for NICS background checks (a loose proxy for firearm sales) have massively increased this year: https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/nics_firearm_checks_-_mo...
Technically, in the United States, you can. Just get all your tax stamps, and make sure the DoE knows about your nuclear material. Good luck finding FOGBANK.
Also good luck filling out all the paperwork. There's a difference between outright banning something and placing an astonishing number of administrative hurdles in the way. Private nuclear weapons come with so much paperwork as to be esssentially impracticable, but never the less possible.
At least that was the verdict last time I looked into the question.
I'd argue a fairer metric would probably be to compare gun deaths to car deaths; nearly twice as many people died to cars in 2019 [0] [1].
I definitely don't think Trump will be "Hitler 2.0". He probably won't even be in office after this election.
Again, however, my primary argument is normative and values-based. I'm not arguing that we only have gun rights because they don't kill x number of people. Even if a hundred thousand people were killed by mass shootings I wouldn't support gun restrictions. We don't restrict people's liberties because others break the law. The thing most gun grabbers miss and that most gun rights proponents won't say is that our primary value is liberty not saving more lives.
Well you're in a dying breed it seems. These days liberty is not worth more than death. In other words, it's increasingly popular to trade some liberty in exchange for saving lives. Take away people's gun liberty, take away people's liberty to refuse wearing a mask, take away people's liberty to say hateful/hurtful things to the vulnerable on social media and you can save thousands, even tens of thousands of lives per year.
The problem with liberty is that some % of people (bad actors) abuse it to cause harm to others
I certainly hope I'm not a dying breed, though the last few months have sadly made it appear that you may be right. I don't see why a sufficiently large number of people believing otherwise is a good argument against my position, though. While I'm certainly open to arguments to the contrary, my general worldview is simply that life is not the paramount value to be sought, but rather liberty instead.
Dying breed? Golly I sure hope not. There's at least two of we liberty guards left at least. The entire country was architected around the premise of liberty being more important than the State's capacity to deliver perfect security.
It must be a cultural difference. For context I'm in the U.K. where a gun being fired would hit local news, a gun-related death would probably make the papers
I'd rather aim towards zero deaths in both columns rather than decide which is the better cause of death. You do you America
You're right that cultural attitudes towards such things are different, but as I said, my argument isn't really about number of deaths but values-based. I value liberty higher than life. I regard those that attempt to deprive others of their liberties to improve their sense of security as authoritarians who must be opposed, forcibly if necessary. My attitudes aren't really predicated on how many lives are lost.
There are costs to freedom, including the potential for abuse. Just like predictive policing is wrong because it goes after those who haven't committed crimes, banning guns is wrong. The death of a ten, a hundred, a thousand, or more people doesn't justify restricting liberty. All guns ought to be legal.